 Welcome to Articulating Why You Need to Know It, part of the research and assessment cycle toolkit offered by the Association of Research Libraries and made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services. This presentation is part of a module that focuses on identifying the needs, context, and goals of library assessment projects. It describes key purposes and time frames for library assessment and identifies possible obstacles to effective library assessment. We hope the content is useful to library practitioners seeking to conduct assessment projects. At the close of the presentation, you will find a link to a feedback form. Please let us know what elements were useful to you. One of the first steps in identifying the needs, context, or goals of a library assessment project is discovering what the library assessment is intended to reveal. What do you need to know and, just as importantly, why do you need to know it? Clearly articulating the purpose of an assessment, what the assessment is intended to help achieve, and why the resulting information and action is necessary within a given time frame can help scope and sequence an assessment project as well as anticipate and overcome hurdles throughout the process. First, let's start with common purposes for library assessment. There are many reasons to engage in library assessment. Assessment enables communication with users, colleagues, stakeholders, decision makers, and others. It's a major and essential feedback process for libraries. Without meaningful engaging assessment in a variety of modes, both formal and informal, libraries make decisions about their services, resources, and spaces without essential information. Used well, assessment moves libraries forward and allows them to improve in a variety of ways. Well-designed assessment serves as a check-in on whether libraries are providing valuable offerings to their users, how they might expand the population of users to gather in others who would enjoy and benefit from library engagement, the degree to which libraries are living their values and goals, and in what ways libraries could change and grow to make more, better, more inclusive, and positive differences in the lives of users. Developing not just an assessment project or program, but a culture of assessment is necessary to gain maximum benefit from assessment projects. A culture of assessment is marked by ongoing two-way communication between libraries and users, informed decision-making, accurate problem definition and resolution, careful stewardship of resources, care for users and library workers, a tolerance for candid evaluation of quality, and an ongoing pursuit of engagement and positive action. A strong culture of assessment can both infuse and support library assessment projects and help keep clear the purpose of a given library assessment, clarity that helps both center and communicate why you need to know about a particular assessment question. Oftentimes the purpose of a library assessment begins and ends with users, that is, the purpose of assessment is to better serve a user group and the results of the assessment are intended to fuel that better service for that group. This chart identifies some large groups within an academic library community. Any of these groups may be subdivided for the purpose of a particular assessment project, but this general list can serve us as a starting point. Once a user group has been selected to serve as the guiding focus and purpose for an assessment project, often the second step is to learn more about what that user group, or perhaps the group is not yet using library services or is more of a stakeholder group, those work too, need or want. What are their goals individually or as a group? What do they care about and need in order to achieve their goals? Once that information is gathered, which can be an assessment project in and of itself, librarians can think about what library experiences might impact or support those needs, concerns or goals. This process can lead to better and less library-centric understanding of the intersections that exist or could exist between what the user group wants and needs and what libraries do or could offer. These associations can then be further explored through assessment work. Understanding these connections so that informed action can be taken is often the purpose of library assessment projects. Assessment may also be designed to help answer other, in some cases more general, questions. For example, the purpose of an assessment might be to better understand a problem or think of ways strengths could be expanded, developed, or customized for a better effect. If an assessment is focused on the general question, library assessment practitioners need to determine what exactly they need or want to learn, whether the answer exists in some form already or whether they will need to gather, analyze, and process new information in order to get an answer, at least in part, to their question. In these situations, one guiding question often leads to other questions and some of those questions are about the anticipated assessment project itself. Once a question is identified to guide an assessment, many more questions crop up, including questions that are focused on the assessment itself. Questions like, how do we find out what we want to know are central, of course, but more mundane questions are just as important to answer. Who will be involved and responsible for the assessment work and do they have the skills they need to do that work? What will the project cost? Costs are sometimes clear cut in terms of financial resources, but what about the human morale involved? When is the answer due and what impact does that have on the assessment process? What will be done with the resulting information? How will it be communicated? What decisions or actions might result? Are those decisions or actions even possible? It's good to know from the start that a variety of assessment result scenarios are possible and probable to avoid assessment projects that result in implications for decisions or actions that no one will actually take. What is the first step and the step after that? All of this planning up front and a full understanding of the purposes and likely results of an assessment are key to developing an effective assessment plan for a particular need or project. It's easy to see how assessment might appear daunting right from the start. Perhaps one simple way to stay focused on the purpose of an assessment and hopefully that focus leads to an end result that is useful and beneficial is to think of assessment as listening. Listening is central to communication and therefore essential for engaged libraries. Assessment helps us listen to users, importantly, but also to library workers and even our library services, resources, and spaces. It helps us listen for gaps and holes where we can make change and improvement. It helps us listen to the library organization as a whole to see that it's operating effectively and in a healthy way. Listening tends to come naturally to those who want to understand and change when needed, but listening actively takes skill, practice, and some structure. Assessment is the same way. For those who might agree that listening is important but not see the connection to library improvement, this list provides some concrete facets of improvement that assessment can inform and contribute to. All of these elements of library service quality are important to library workers and all can be improved through active listening, that is, active assessment, of users. Likewise, improvement in any one of these areas might be the purpose of a given assessment. Slightly more inward looking is an assessment purpose that strives to better understand and fine tune the library organization itself. Just as valid as an external facing assessment, an assessment focused on a self-check helps librarians answer questions about vision, actions consistent with stated values and goals, learning from mistakes and others. Again, any one of these areas can serve as the purpose of an assessment. Clearly, any number of questions can serve as a purpose for an assessment project. In addition to assessment as listening, we can also think of assessment as learning. Most assessment projects seek to help us listen and learn to determine, are we doing the right things? Are we doing things right? How do we know they're the right things? Answering these questions, again, listening and learning, is nearly always the purpose of an assessment. In order to articulate clearly why you need to conduct an assessment, you need to know not only the purpose of the assessment, but also the timeframe. Why does an assessment need to be conducted now? What's the impetus for the project? Is there a deadline? What decisions or actions need to be or should be made and by when? As we just reviewed, there might be a number of reasons why an assessment needs to occur, why you need to know some specific thing. The library you or an opposing entity might hope to improve library offerings, advocate for resources, communicate with users, stop something old or start something new, celebrate successes, make decisions, take actions, or achieve any number of outcomes. So how does timeframe impact this work? Timeframes for assessment might impact the overall ability to accomplish the assessment purpose in various ways. For example, knowing or understanding some assessment information at a particular time might be of greater or lesser value. Perhaps there's a deadline that, once passed, makes knowing less important or useful. Financial deadlines might be one example, program review or accreditation another. Knowing information at a crucial decision point might help users in accomplishing their goals. Not knowing might prevent their accomplishment of those goals. So deadlines and use by dates for assessment information can help form an idea of what an assessment must reveal and by when. In other situations, no hard or soft deadline exists, and in these cases, sometimes assessment plans must balance what might be lost or what harm might be caused by rushing with what negative consequences might result from delay. Three common assessment timeframes are as needed, which can be difficult to plan for in advance, according to some external deadline, which can be planned for but may otherwise be inflexible, and internally set, which is often the case when more information is sought for solving a problem. Each of these timeframes has implications for assessment planning. One of the key reasons for the need to carefully articulate why one needs to know information from an assessment project, including the required timeframe, is to anticipate and hopefully overcome hurdles to the process. Such hurdles include resistance and flawed assessment processes or results. There are of course other hurdles as well, as varied as the particular assessment project and context. Some hurdles that can be anticipated include various objections to the assessment process in general. Some obstacles might be mostly based in fear or concern, others may be firmly based in reality. Hurdles that might be used as reasons to avoid assessment include a lack of leadership or expertise in assessment. Some might believe that assessment processes aren't adequate for measuring, judging, or learning more about the focus of the assessment in a given situation. Others might fear negative results or unflattering comparisons to others. Overcoming these hurdles depends, of course, on the degree to which the concerns are real. A lack of assessment leadership or expertise should be addressed in any number of ways. Expertise, for example, can be gained through training, professional development, engagement with consultants, and so on. A fear of negative results, as another example, can be tricky. If a situation is negative, not knowing about it by avoiding assessment is not an acceptable resolution. Negative situations should be identified, explored, and addressed. However, if a positive culture of assessment is not in place in a library organization, the fear of negative results requires substantial pre-work to overcome. In any case, understanding possible hurdles and preparing for ways to address them in advance is essential for successful assessment projects. Another set of hurdles is rooted in an assessment gone wrong, so to speak. Assessments fail if assessment information is not collected, if the collected information is not relevant or useful, any harm occurs in the collection analysis or use of information, too much data is collected and therefore can't be analyzed effectively or in time, or the whole process works flawlessly but no forward progress is achieved. Guarding against these negative outcomes requires both anticipation and planning. In closing, understanding what needs to be learned or understood as a result of assessment and articulating the purpose and timeframe for that process clearly is necessary for effective assessment that results in positive outcomes. Some key ideas that can support that process are included here and on the following slide. They include the idea that assessment is a process that's conducted by design, not by happenstance or accident. Targeted small assessments can be just as effective and often far more doable and therefore actionable than big sprawling assessments. There are almost always endless ways to assess, that is, to listen and learn, and no one way is the right way. The key is to find a fit between design and method and the purpose or need for assessment. In addition, assessments should be core to an overarching process of reflection and continuous improvement and proactive engagement with environments, culture, and society. Other big ideas that support assessment purposes include that assessment must be supported through words, resources, and actions to be successful, that assessment is a waste of time unless it can make an impact change or informed decision not to change, and that assessment, as listening and learning, is essential to ongoing improvement. Thank you for viewing this presentation on identifying the needs, context, and goals of library assessment projects. Please use the link provided to complete a feedback form on the usefulness of this information for your purposes.